“They don't like my appearance, want to know why I look this way and want to explain why it bothers them. Fair enough, I look pretty weird,” Wu told me over email. “For people actually in the maker and tech community, it's a tough bit of ground to make a stand on. Yup, I look like a sex worker to you. So what? Are sex workers not welcome in the community?”

Wu holds a 3D-printed image of herself wearing her most famous outfit, the underlit LED skirt. (Image via Naomi Wu)

Wu is neither a sex worker or someone who lets the derision of pseudoanonymous redditors slow her down. She declined to provide her legal name for the story.

Wu has spent the last two years working remotely in software development by using the name and banking info of one of her male classmates. She was vaguely aware of the issues women face in tech from her hometown of Shenzhen, China, when she decided to hide her gender from her employers. Knowing what she does now, Wu has no regrets on that decision.

“Coding was always about freedom, I can do this work at home, take care of myself, be who I like and dress how I like,” Wu told me. “Sometimes the thing we love about our work is just that it lets us do the things we love.”

Despite a study showing women to be superior coders to men, females only make up 11.2 percent of software developers, the Guardian reported in February 2016. This Guardian piece was punctuated by another from siliconbeat in March 2016 that claims “female computer programmers make 72 cents for every dollar earned by male programmers.”

Wu is unsure how much longer she will code for since she must use a virtual private network (VPN) to circumvent China’s notorious firewall to access websites hosted overseas. The resources inside the country for coding in modern frameworks are limited or of low quality, Wu added

She is hedging her bets by immersing herself in the maker movement, which AdWeek defined as an “umbrella term for independent inventors, designers and tinkerers.”

The following is an edited interview with Wu about her favorite projects, hate speech online and growing up in China.

Alfonso: Your underlit skirt was one of your most popular reddit posts ever; what's the story behind it?

Wu: There was going to be a large Maker Faire and I had seen on various Maker websites that LED clothing was often a big feature of the after Faire parties so I set about seeing what I could put together. A Japanese designer named Kiyoyuki Amano had created a sort of underlit tutu that I had bookmarked as interesting but not really compatible with my style.

Photo via Naomi Wu

Using off the shelf parts (an advantage of living in Shenzhen) I made a bluetooth-controlled version of it and documented the build so other women could modify it to fit the sort of clothes they liked to wear. It was somewhat unusual in that it did not require using an Arduino or doing any programming, so it really was suitable for the most absolute beginners.

I had no idea it would get the attention it did and of course I don't really think the skirt merits it, even if it was wonderful experience for an otherwise anonymous Chinese girl from a city most people don't even know exists.

Photo via Naomi Wu

The party I wore the skirt at was held by Hackaday and their staff was amazing, incredibly nice people. At the party tons of people took photos of my skirt and asked questions. The traditional Maker "Show & Tell" where you show what you've made, explain how you've made it, and get feedback on what you could do better or differently is an unbeatable and addictive experience that I've become totally hooked on in the past year.

Wu: Pockets are a massive design issue for women; we almost never have them. When we do, it usually destroys the lines of whatever clothes we are wearing. Until we can genetically engineer marsupial pouches for our cellphones, everything women need to navigate the modern world is in our handbags. It's a single failure point—which is nearly always a terrible thing. If you're out and you leave your bag somewhere or, worse yet, it gets snatched, it's a pretty scary situation—no phone, no money, no way to get home. It got me thinking about emergency compartments and since I'd already mounted bluetooth- controlled LEDs in a hollowed out platform heel it was pretty easy to take it from there.

Photo via Naomi Wu

The 3D printable shoe is intended as a customizable enclosure for any kind of maker project but particularly for the "brains" of wearable computer projects. A Raspberry Pi and battery pack fit in without any problem. While they are really meant as emergency storage or an enclosure for electronics projects, I went with the pentesting angle as a bit of fun. All the talk of Chinese hackers, I know it's a real thing but I could not resist going with it for a laugh. I'd done a locksport (lockpicking) workshop and had seen a few tutorials on pentesting. I'm far from being a hacker, like any developer I can use command line and I can stumble through a Kali Linux tutorial as well as anyone, but it's like calling a handyman with a screwdriver a professional burglar.

Alfonso: You’ve faced a measurable amount of harassment from reddit users. How do you handle the vitriol?

Wu: It always makes me uncomfortable this men versus women angle many tech stories seem to take. I'm sure it's been the experience for a lot of women, but not really for me. Online my supporters and critics are pretty well divided between men and women. Sure there's an element of sexism but there's more than just that.

Flipping quickly through one of my galleries, I'm going to look at first glance like a Western sex worker—the idea that only men might have objections or some follow up questions is silly. After all we can all agree that the "Booth Babe" dynamic—pretty girls presenting tech they don't understand and can't speak articulately about—undermines legitimate female professionals in their vicinity, there is definitely precedent for girls in skimpy outfits not being at all a good thing. So questions and concerns—totally on board, same page. In my experience women actually in STEM quickly "get it" and are on my side, others just find appearance an insurmountable obstacle. In any event, my physical appearance is part of the presentation, it would be silly for me to be annoyed by people paying attention to it.

Right now appearance alone is qualification to be a celebrity, would the world be such a terrible place if also being competent at something was the new standard? We should be so lucky teenage girls start posting Instagram selfies with their increasingly complex Arduino projects in attempts to one-up their classmates.

At the end of the day, if you are arguing on behalf of arbitrary standards of female modesty in 2016—and want them to apply to a women in another country with a completely different culture—you're in for a tough time. The people who are left over and stick to their guns tend to be somewhat fanatical types, and they can get pretty unpleasant. I spend a lot of time defending myself that I really rather spend making things, or learning to make things better. But if you don't defend yourself they take control of the narrative and you find people repeating things as truth that just aren't.

Alfonso: What maker project are you working on now?

Wu: I've been shooting a lot of 360º immersive videos of Shenzhen for YouTube. Different places related to the tech industry that I think Westerners might find interesting. I also keep getting drawn back to wearables. How to incorporate the tech we need to function in the modern world into an outfit so it's part of it and not just an accessory. Drones are big business here in Shenzhen and I've been bitten by the FPV racing bug. I've taught a few women to fly little nano drones and we are thinking about starting some kind of stock drone racing league. As far as the future, education interests me—I fascinate Chinese kids. Also since I was educated entirely in China I know how difficult it is to learn the creative process without access to Western institutions. For most Chinese that's not an option, but we all still need to learn to innovate given the social and economic changes that are occurring. "Go to school in America" is not really a scalable solution.